Best posts made by Thenomain

I always play on normal difficulty because I want to /beat/ the game, not just observe the art of the 'Game Over' screen.

@kitteh said in FS3:

@Thenomain It still comes off preachy. At least being told 'hey if you don't like it, don't play' comes off as unnecessarily extreme.

And yet, I didn't. I said you had two unfortunate choices. I don't like staring reality full in the face either, as I've taken option #1 a whole lot of times. Really, having this kind of unfettered access to a game creator who is willing to have these discussions is rare and should be handled better than "I hate this decision."

But I'm pretty sure we're all enjoying the game and don't need to be reminded we can take our balls home.

Then you're reading a different thread than I am, because I've seen people complain without consideration about who they're complaining about far too many times, especially concerning FS3. It happens.

@faraday said in FS3:

@Thenomain For the record I have no issues with the suggestions @kitteh has made nor the tone of them. This thread has been refreshingly constructive. But I appreciate the support.

That's fair, but now @kitteh and I are locked in a "I'm offended by your defending yourself" cycle, that strange artifact of the Internet where people don't care to hear what someone is saying about themselves, because you're focused on yourself.

This is me breaking that discussion. Thanks for giving me the leverage.

@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

This might be a case @Thenomain might want to chip in about code solving social problems, but what if we allowed players to privately or publicly list general categories of things they are into or squicked by?

The rule is: "Be very careful when trying to solve social issues with code."

The reason for this is because you can't expect everyone to act in the same way. (MUDs are proving me wrong; there are games that can expect everyone to act in the same way, but I'm not going to get into that right now.)

This is the RP Preferences list, another cue taken from Shang, et al., that works. It works because it doesn't enforce, it informs.

A case of code being used poorly is, "If it's on someone's list and you hit them with it, you can be punished." There is so much wrong with this that I don't know where to start. Another, more code-centric example would be, "At the start of each scene, everyone must enter keywords about what they're going to do in this scene." This may work for events (again, informs), but for every scene that someone might be involved in? No. No. One hundred times no.

Let's say no one can see the 'no' list because some people might not want to announce their blindspots for the whole world to see. So how it'd work is I spot an +event I like and I /signup for it. The ST then (perhaps after a delay so they can't deduce who is who) gets to get a list of all the participants' YES and NO lists, without knowing who's who, and can plan accordingly.

Would that work?

Er, sorry, I got distracted. Yes, it would work, but it would be probably far too easy to social engineer people's "no" lists. Hell, I have people tagging my alts within three poses. If your game culture accepts the 'no' list is kind of an open secret, like how we deal with 'What Race Are You' in WoD/CoD games, then it would work far better. Put the social pressure on people who use events to abuse the system.

I would like to see it tried.

@WTFE

Eh, I never minded people wanting to raise awareness of something without being an activist for it. If they donate one dollar to a cause and ask everyone they know to also donate one dollar to a cause, they're still doing something for that cause.

I don't consider hashtags to be this kind of awareness. It is great for making people aware of what kind of beliefs you have, but the idea that I should care what you believe in is, IMO, contributing to the divisiveness of our great and glorious cultures. Not because dissenting views are bad, but because the other half of dissenting views is talking about them.

I consider Samantha Bee and Seth Meyers to be more informative than Stephen Colbert because they not only say what they believe, but they report on why. We can talk about why. We can't talk about whose dicks are in whom's mouth.

Yes, I think Bee and Meyers are the part of the solution. Colbert just has a different kind of show, which is fine.

Wait, where was I?

But what tags can do, and it's what we're talking about here, is start the discussion. But what we need to do in this modern culture is have the discussion. And if the hashtag draws attention to the discussion, then it's being used as part of the solution.

What code cannot do is force the discussion. That's up to us.

@Ghost

The number of people who whine about using MPAA ratings are mighty. I don't know what they expect, but call it "useless". I suggested using ESRB, but am usually met with silence. The nitpickery over tags, here, is mainly why we can't have nice things.

@surreality

Okay, I'm getting on the bandwagon now. Please note that I agree with you in theory.

In practice, I don't think you're discussing, and I think I know why. You seem afraid that if you don't get the things you think are important to protect yourself then you won't be protected. You and I have been on many games where getting information from staff is like getting blood from a stone, and what you feel is necessary they feel is unreasonable. This is why I won't play Arx. Been there. Done that.

Almost nobody is telling you to not play on a game because there's a 1% chance for you getting triggered. They--and I am joining them--are saying that there is no way to reasonably expect adequate coverage. The best we can do is try, and if that's not good enough for you then I don't know what else anyone can say.

There is a certain point that only you can prevent problems with you. Asking people to cater to this is asking a lot of them. If they say "no", then you can't reasonably get angry at them. They have a whole game to run, a life to lead. I sympathize and, as I've been closer to these situations than I ever care to be, I even empathize, but there's only so much any one human being can ask of another. The best one can do is hope, or change their situation.

It sucks, but we're all just human.

One thing that I think all games should do is have a concise and accurate description of the game's theme, and another one for setting.

I've been advocating this for years. "Just read the history files" is never enough to introduce someone to a game, and in @Surreality's defense it could be the very first step of discovering if a game is for you, or if you can put up with potential issues.

It just makes sense for me to have a good descriptive standard about the game. "This game is about this." Businesses have Mission Statements. So should your game.

"BSG: Humanity fights for survival against a nearly impossible to defeat enemy, sometimes with them. Will they have the hope and will to continue on in the uncaring void of space?"

Okay, I went straight to the depressing, but damn what they did to Cally, Dualla, and Six (on Pegasus), it wasn't a cheery show. If I didn't know the show already, I might not be ready for this level of holy-shit.

If I did know the show, I'd expect this level of pressing hopelessness, people suffering PTSD in the middle of the war. A Mission Statement helps keep the staff aware about their goal as much as inform the player.

There are many better examples in the RPG Primetime Adventures. Many RPGs have a section about how to decide what your table is going to play, but none are as concise, and do far better than any other source I've seen.

@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

A clearer example, perhaps, on the broader point, would be something like this: instead of a restaurant, picture you're that person with the food allergy again.

No, no, stop, see, just stop. Everyone has their example. Several people are countering with one example with another. There's a point—often starting with 'for example'—where those examples confuse the issue. And when someone else chimes in with their example, you end up with people telling others that they are missing what you're saying, and they say that you're missing what you're saying. More examples doesn't help. Addressing the confusion helps. "Talking past each other" is a thing that is happening and you are violently agreeing with things that at least half a dozen people have said.

+1 to @The-Tree-of-Woe.

@Ghost said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

Edit: will note, I'm still a fan of my idea of a toggle command that silently forwards incoming pages to and from from a target, one-way only, to staff channel. Like a silent alert.

Now for Coder Theno!

The SUSPECT flag does something close to this, adding every single thing typed by a person to the hardcode log file, where it can be poured over. I know what you're talking about and you want something more specific, but there's something there.

@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

@kitteh said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

(ie, a clique going around spreading nasty rumors is somewhat obvious, a clique coordinating mass downvotes is not).

This actually happened here, believe it or not. One of the reasons they're gone, I believe.

I missed this snippet from @kitteh while composing my other two replies.

As Headstaff on The Reach, I found it very easy to identify rumor mills. It's even easier if people are using Skype to coordinate.

What is not easy is deciding what to do about it. There is only one thing you can do on these games to punish a player, and that is reducing or removing their ability to play.

And if a group is coordinated enough that they can create pressure via rumor mill, they are also probably generating RP for the game meaning you're now thinking about doing elective surgery on your own face. (If they've entirely cliqued it up, that's another thing. That wart is easier to excise.)

I don't have an answer, and I may be agreeing with things I didn't read or consider, but I think the above is extremely important to point out. Players bring play, and that makes them harder to punish.

@Arkandel

I would have to see the survey for the wording, but I saw "played a board or card game once a week", not "a White Wolf etc. etc."

@Arkandel said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:

@Thenomain said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:

but the more I think of seeing the name "Mark Rein-Hagen" and how people left even Onyx Path over the hiring of Zak at White Wolf, I'm not sure I can be excited for this.

For those of us not keeping up with the Joneses, can you explain this? The names mean nothing to me.

Mark Rein-Hagen (actually, the dash is the bullet-point dot, and sometimes he got snippy about this) was the co-owner of White Wolf Game Studios and creator of Vampire: The Masquerade. He's the reason for some of the more faux-edgy decisions in Werewolf, the god-awful Bunk Cards in Changeling, and the schitzophrenic magic system in Mage. Also, see above re: him getting snippy about people not putting the bullet in his name. That was pretty typical of 1990s Mark. Maybe he's changed. Dunno.

I don't see any evidence on his Wikipedia page that he's working for White Wolf. Still, seeing his name associated with White Wolf makes me cautiously pessimistic.

@faraday

So on Aether (anyone remember Aether? I know a few of you did), we abstracted a percentile system. People could see their percentile, but when it came to comparison, they only knew how that related to the percentiles of others. That is, did they succeed "overwhelming" or "barely" or somewhere in between? Eventually we revealed the percentage, but only how much better you were.

There was some threat that people would do the math to find out the exact value of someone else's stats, but two things were in our favor.

1. It was Attribute + Skill, and you didn't need to compare the same Attr+Skill between people. This was pretty cool because Warfare + Swords vs. Dex + Dodge. Easy.
2. It reported how the two totals compared. If you're 4% better than someone else, what does that mean? It's not a straight up success/fail system, and (while this wouldn't work for FS3) it meant that people had to decide what this meant. It really forced them to work together.

My favorite application of this in a success/fail system is the "success with drawback" or "fail with partial success" in the middle. I've seen some better than others, but it does mean that even at Maxed Out Perfect there's a chance where you'll have to take a hit.

... I have distracted myself and not directly responded to your post. I hope this is interesting and can help.

@ThatGuyThere

I believe you're right, but I think our typical 3-round WoD combat of, say, 6 total participants (PCs and NPCs) probably has around 18 (combat) + 12 (preparation) = 30 rolls. If we're lucky. That is a huge sample size, and skews what we know of WoD. Mind you, WoD also has one billionty thousand permutations of attributes, skills, powers, and other nonsense, many of them designed to completely overwhelm the situations we tend to have (i.e., combat and precious little else).

I guess my point here is that it's just important how you play a game as what the stat system looks like.

@The-Sands said in FS3:

So I dug down a little bit more into the probabilities of FS3 and found something that I think exemplifies what happens when you design a challenge resolution system using a semi-arbitrary 'this sort of feels good' mechanism.

This just came to mind, not to discount anything anyone has said about this, but it'd be a shorter list to find a rolled RPG stat system where this isn't true. The rest of the analysis is deeply interesting but, yeah.

@The-Sands said in FS3:

@Thenomain You're not wrong there. Sometimes it just drives me crazy that game designers pay so little attention to their math.

Most RPG game designers are authors, a field not known to attract many people going for the sciences. Conversely, most of the best board game designers do have a strong grasp of statistics, or know how to fake it. Guess which field makes enough money to live on? (Hint, not RPGs.) I would hate to see an RPG designed solely by an expert statistician, but would forgive a badly mathed game made by an expert writer.

This reminds me of that one illustrator/designer that Google hired to help them fine-tune their brand. He quit after a few months because the engineers were arguing technicalities over various shades of blue.

--

edit, because sloppy connection: @Faraday, consider instead mapping it out as an 'at least' graph. Those curves sure are wonky, but visually it'd be easier to understand. And probably still wonky. Probably.

@The-Sands said in FS3:

Heck, even games like Dungeons and Dragons weren't actually developed by one person.

TSR was two people. Then four. Then ten. And by the time they could afford more, they couldn't make it any different. Oh they could, but then people would revolt and go somewhere else. By the time that WotC bought them (a board game company), TSR had tried other systems. And people kept coming back to D&D. The bad statistics was far from making it unpopular. Hell, around 3e/3.5, the games that were supposed to "fix" the bad math of D&D, some upstart company made Pathfinder and ate WotC/Hasbro's dessert. Not quite their lunch, but enough to continue to show that most people don't care about the math; they care how it feels.

So yeah, I know what it's like to be one person in a crowd shaking your nerd fist nerdingly. It's still a very interesting analysis.

@kitteh

I agree. Oh how I agree. But eventually you'll have to explain to someone what a "+1" means, and you'll have to find some kind of way to explain it. You have XP to spend, how do you know what to spend it on. You are building a situation for people to overcome, how do you decide what numbers to put where to make it challenging.

It works in cRPGs. I think it works in cRPGs because the game is balanced to a certain story. In MMOs, it's balanced because if you die trying something you have a lot of solid feedback and oh my god the analysis people do on these things is insane, and the time and effort put into coding these things are insane.